Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
One of the few ‘wildlife’ pictures I’ve taken. I just don’t have the patience for wildlife photography. As I recall this was taken by the lake in the Rockefeller Preserve back in May 2010 – with my then ‘carry everywhere’ camera: a Panasonic Lumix ZS-3.
One of the very few pictures I’ve taken of wildlife. I just don’t have the patience required to take good wildlife pictures. Wildlife photography also seems to require very fast telephoto lenses, which I don’t have and which are quite expensive to acquire.
This was taken during a walkabout with a friend. The geese were not happy to have us come close to their young and I know from experience that they can be quite aggressive when aroused. So we had to give them a wide berth. Luckily the grassy area to the right was quite wide so we could quite easily get around them. Otherwise it would have been a long walk back the way we came.
The house where these dogs reside is about a five minute walk from where I live. The dogs are often off-leash in the garden. They run around the garden and when they see me with our dog Jackson they start barking and they run towards us. However, they never go past a certain point in the garden. I guess there’s an invisible fence. Of course Jackson doesn’t understand this and always looks puzzled when they won’t come over to him.
Early this morning I was sitting having a coffee when this little guy turned up. At first he perched on the head of a statue in our garden. Definitely picture worthy – but where were my cameras? I have a house full of them, and I usually have the most frequently used (Nex 5N and RX100) close to hand for when I go out. Unfortunately, because of visitors my wife had insisted that all the cameras had to be put out of sight. They were downstairs, so off I went thinking that by the time I got back the squirrel would have departed. When I got back he was still there.
I grabbed the RX100 because of it’s slightly longer zoom than the 45mm Minolta I had on the Nex. The squirrel was still quite a long way away and it was rather dark outside. This is a very extreme crop and the resulting pictures were dark and grainy. Regular processing in Lightroom couldn’t save them so I thought I’d go for the “Vintage” look (a la “Instagramme”. Here’s the result:
While I’m not particularly happy with it (it’s still very grainy and really only suitable for very small size web viewing) it’s better than nothing.